The invention relates to an electric lamp arrangement intended as an imitation candle.
Imitation candles are well known and normally comprise a substantially cylindrical body, which is intended to give the impresssion of the stearine or wax body of a true candle, and an electric-light bulb intended, when switched on, to give the illusion of a candle flame.
Although it is possible to produce perfect imitations of the candle body or casing itself, it has not been possible hitherto to produce an acceptable imitation of a candle flame. Attempts have been made to give the glass envelope of the bulb a design which resembles a candle flame, and to produce a bulb which emits a "flickering" light. The illusion thus created, however, has been a very poor imitation of a real candle. In recent years attempts have been made to suspend the bulb on a coil spring and to connect the bulb to a magnetizable counterweight which is periodically acted upon by a magnetic field. Although the effect afforded by these attempts is an improvement on the arrangement employing rigidly mounted bulbs, the results have not been found acceptable, and in addition the imitation candles thus produced give off an irritating sound, such as a clicking sound for example, when the counterweight is drawn against the electric coil generating the magnetic field.
Consequently, it has been decided that the only possible way of producing an electric-light bulb which gives a satisfactory imitation of a candle flame is to design the bulb in such a way that the effect desired is produced by the bulb itself. Lamp-bulb designs created along these lines have mainly involved making the actual glass envelopes of the bulbs by hand, and then manually colouring the envelopes thus produced. Such bulbs are particularly expensive, partly because of the manual labour required and partly because of the relatively low demand for such bulbs. Consequently, the finished product is practically unsaleable.